She smiled sweetly and serenely and did not comment on what I said. She took me into a large room with a floor and walls of fine white marble and in the centre a bath twice as large as the one next to her room, and with more carving. She told me her master had brought this extraordinary bath from Rome. The bath was truly amazing, as was everything in this room and the other rooms. But suddenly a mysterious sadness came over me, welling up from inside, and distracted me from my surroundings, and I was no longer interested in these mundane and ephemeral vanities.
As she took me around the whole house, I walked with her, but my mind was elsewhere and wary. I felt that she was tempting me, trying to make staying with her seem more attractive, and I resisted by saying to myself, ‘How could I consent to be a servant in the home of a Sicilian merchant, and husband to a pagan servant woman who is five years my senior and always taking me by surprise with her irrepressible sexual desires? Who knows, maybe her master sleeps with her! If not, who else taught her all this debauchery she has shown me? Her master must be a real libertine who follows his desires, fills his house with loose women, spends his nights in Alexandria in their arms and has Octavia join them.’ At that moment I felt a powerful hatred for this man and intense anger towards this woman, who had almost made me fall in love with her and forget all my hopes.
‘This, my love, is the library,’ she said.
Her words, and her gentle touch on my shoulder, broke my train of thought. When we went into the room, I was in awe at the number of books arranged on shelves the length of the wall and the scrolls set in holes in the walls. I had always loved books. I wanted to be alone and I almost wept for no reason, maybe because of my constant frustration. I asked if I could stay a while with the books and my request pleased her. She kissed me on the cheek and said she would go to prepare lunch.
Octavia left me puzzled in the midst of the vast room. I looked around the walls, which were full of cavities for storing papyruses and shelves for arranging books. In those days I could read in Greek and Egyptian but I had not yet mastered Hebrew or Aramaic. In the library I found books in other languages, such as the upstart language Latin, and eastern languages the likes of which I had not seen before. How many languages did he read, this libertine merchant who did not believe in any god? Or perhaps he bought the books to show off, as most rich and stupid people do. No, it didn’t look as if he were showing off, because on his elegant desk in the corner of the room I found books strewn around and two folded volumes on papyrus, with comments in Greek written in a fine hand. When I leafed through the volumes on his desk and on the shelves, I found marginal notes and commentaries all written in the same hand and signed with his name. So it was he who read Greek and the other languages. As far as I could tell from his intelligent comments, most of his reading was in history and literature. The man had several old copies of Aesop’s fables and the poems of Heraclitus, the philosopher. He also had a theological epistle by Origen. I began to turn the pages of the books and open out the folded scrolls, and on the edges I could see more comments and marginal notes.
‘My love, the food is ready, come on.’
‘I’ll stay another hour. I’m not hungry now,’ I said.
‘Come on, the food will go cold. Don’t vex me as the Sicilian master does. It’s obvious you like books just as he does.’
‘Could you bring the food here?’ I asked.
‘No, that wouldn’t do. We’ll eat in my room. The books won’t fly away. Come on, leave that book, because I’m very hungry and I miss you so much.’
She took the book from my hand and put it back in its place on the shelf. She opened the thick leather cover and said with a chuckle, ‘Aristotle, do you want to make us miss our delicious hot lunch, for the sake of this man?’
What she said startled me, and the way she made fun of the great philosopher. ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ I said in anger. ‘Aristotle is the teacher of the ancient world and the first person to give mankind the principles of thought and the science of logic.’
‘Ha, so before him mankind didn’t know logic and the principles of thought? Anyway, I don’t like him because in his books he says many foolish things, and claims that women and slaves share the same nature, different from the nature of free men. Retarded!’
‘Octavia, that’s no way to talk. But I see you are familiar with the learning of the ancients.’
‘Ha, I know some things and the Sicilian master likes to read me ancient texts. He’s interested in teaching me. A neighbour of ours, a rich Christian, saw him one day reading to me in the garden of the house and said, “The Sicilian is giving the snake poison to drink.” Our new neighbour is also retarded, like your old friend.’
I didn’t know how to answer her, and she gave me no time to think. She pulled me gently by the hand out of the room and at the door she gave me a long hug. Octavia never stopped. ‘This kiss is an appetizer,’ she joked.
We sprawled on the floor of her room and while she put food in my mouth in the usual way, she said the Sicilian master would like me, because he liked learning and scholars. She said he was friends with the governor of the city and had many acquaintances. He would help me to study medicine and she would surround me with her love until I became the most famous physician in Alexandria, in fact the most famous physician in the world. To my surprise, she added: ‘My love, you will be more famous than Galen and Hippocrates, and all the followers of the god Asclepius.’
‘Octavia, you do know a lot,’ I said.
‘All I want to know is you. Tell me, are you happy with me? No, don’t answer now. Be patient and you’ll see. The Sicilian master will be back in a month and I’ll tell him everything about us and he’ll welcome you amongst us.’
The Sicilian master! I felt hatred towards him, a deep hatred, mixed with a certain reverence and foolish envy after I had seen his comments and annotations. Bewildered, I let slip my thoughts: ‘Does the Sicilian master sleep with you?’
My question shocked her and tears suddenly welled up in her eyes. Her face went red in sadness and in anger. I had not meant to say that exactly, but rather to ask what kind of relationship they had and did the man flirt with her when he was at home, especially as she was a single widow with strong desires, or rather whether he asked her to warm his bed on winter nights and relieve his loneliness when he missed his dog. I meant, did he, as her master, have a right to sleep with her?
Octavia bowed her head and looked at the edge of the carpet without saying a word. When I tried to placate her by giving her a hug, she slipped away and burst into tears. I regretted offending her and thought of standing up straight away in front of her and leaving, to end everything between us in a single move. When I suddenly arose she seemed to understand what I intended and she grabbed the hem of my gown. I stopped and she, still bowing her head, pulled me to the ground. I sat down, my eyes pinned on the half-open door.
A long silence reigned between us. It was she who broke it, saying in a trembling voice, after wiping her cheeks, that she did not understand anything I was saying, because the Sicilian master was just like a father to her, in fact more like a grandfather than a father. It was he who had brought her up after her mother and father died. He was a man who took pity on the afflicted and, so she said, every year donated half of his earnings from trade to the poor of Alexandria.
‘I apologize, Octavia. But you are very beautiful, I mean...’
‘Enough, don’t apologize, and I’ll forgive you because you don’t yet know the man you accuse,’ she said.
SCROLL FIVE
Octavia’s Enticements (2)
Life is unfair. It carries us along and distracts us, then it takes us by surprise and changes us, until we end up quite unlike what we once were. Was it I who was in Alexandria twenty years ago? How can life now hold me to account for the mistakes and sins I committed in those days? How can the Lord on the Day of Judgement take us back and hold us responsible for what we did ages ago, as though we lived one life without
changing in the course of it? It did not take me long to realize that I had misjudged Octavia and her Sicilian master, but by then it was too late, and the dead had died and the living were as dead.
Octavia remained silent that night, other than for a few words. Her silence troubled me, until I began to feel drowsy and I fell asleep on her bed. The last thing I was aware of before I slept was the sad way she looked at me as she pulled the cover over me. She woke me early in the morning by moving about, and I was reassured to find her smiling and sitting on the ground next to the bed. In front of her lay the breakfast she had prepared for us, spread on the ground. In the morning I again apologized for what I had said the previous night but she put a stop to my mumbling with a touch of her fingertips on my mouth, and a tear which glistened in the depths of her eyes. She changed the subject by asking me about my native country and my early life. I answered as best I could without saying anything important, but she hung on every word I said.
‘Come and I’ll show you something,’ she said.
She pulled me by some invisible leash, and we went downstairs to the big bedroom with the Sicilian master’s bed in it. I had seen the room before from the door but this time we went in. Octavia opened the window and the door to the large balcony which looked out over the beach and the sea nearby. Light flooded the place. I did not go out on the balcony in case the guard or some passer-by saw me, although I would have liked to sit a little on the sturdy wooden bench, contemplating from this unusual angle the merging of the sea and sky.
‘That’s the Sicilian master,’ she said.
Octavia pointed to a wooden coffin leaning upright in the right-hand corner of the room, on the side opposite the balcony. The coffin was finely painted with the image of a grey-haired man in Greek dress of the type worn by rich people. There was an inscrutable sadness in his eyes, and an intelligence. The image was drawn in the style common among the rich in Memphis and Alexandria, who had their faces depicted on their coffins and were then mummified and buried in them when they died. Mummification is a traditional pagan custom. The ancient Egyptians used to preserve their bodies after death in granite sarcophaguses on which they had images of the old gods carved. Then, in more recent times, the sarcophaguses were made of wood and they started to paint a picture of the dead person on the lid. When I looked at the picture of the Sicilian I realized that Octavia meant to show me that he was advanced in years and had the sedate appearance of a philosopher. As if to reinforce the impression left by the picture of the man, she added, ‘He lives an ascetic life, keeps his coffin in his bedroom and always thinks about death. On most days when he is in Alexandria, he sits on this balcony of his and looks out to sea, or reads books.’
‘Why does he look so sad?’ I asked.
‘Because he’s lonely. He’s also a poet. Would you like to see his poems?’
I agreed. She took me to the large library, took from the drawer of the desk some papers with poems written in Greek in the same hand I had seen in the margins of the books. Without me asking, Octavia left me in the library, but first she gave me a quick hug and repeated in my ear in a whisper, ‘I love you.’ I stayed silent. After a long kiss at the base of my neck she left the poems in my hands and told me she would go and make us a delicious lunch. She came several times to look over me with a smile, and I was happy among the books.
The Sicilian master’s poems were like his picture – gentle and sad. Most of them were ironic meditations on life and the sea, in the style of the ancient poets and the modern philosophers. I liked some of his lines of poetry, and on one of the occasions when Octavia dropped by I asked her to bring me some paper so I could copy them out. She gave me a long scroll of papyrus and two pieces of skilfully tanned goatskin parchment. I did not copy the Greek poems in the normal way, because of their excessively pagan nature, but instead I wrote the words vertically, from bottom to top, in separate columns, so that if the lines were read horizontally or in any way other than my way, they would look like just individual words with no meaning, and individual words are harmless and bring no sin. The sin comes about only when the words are framed in sentences.
In the same manner I copied out some of the commentaries the Sicilian master had written in the margins of the Greek translation of the Old Testament – I mean the translation known as the Septuagint – and his commentaries on some of the Gospels. His commentaries would begin with the phrase, ‘How could anyone believe that...’ and then he would provide a summary of the verses, and comment on them saying that it was logically impossible to accept such ideas. As far as I could see, the man did not understand that religion has nothing to do with reason and that faith is faith only if it defies reason and logic, or else it is thought and philosophy. But none the less I pitied this bewildered man at the time, just as today I pity myself for my own excessive perplexity.
At noon the room filled with the smell of delicious cooking. I closed the door, opened the window carefully and continued rummaging through books and copying out commentaries. The papyrus scroll was not yet full when Octavia came in with her usual good cheer to invite me to eat. I asked for a little more time, but she insisted. She was wearing a thin blue dress open at the front and the arms. Her thick brown hair ran riot around her smiling face. Octavia was a beautiful woman.
I rose with her, leaving the books, the inkstand and the scroll on the floor, in the hope of coming back after lunch, but I never did come back. Even the scroll I abandoned there.
I was in a good mood when we went to her room. The food was in bowls spread on the floor. It wasn’t the food that pleased me, but rather the way Octavia took care of me. After my father died I was not accustomed to having anyone give me the affectionate attention that she lavished on me. Despite her entreaties I could not eat much, although the food was delicious. My desire for her was stronger than my appetite for food, and she detected my desire from the long looks I gave her and she did not resist when I moved towards her and pulled her close. I suddenly felt that I loved her and that perhaps she was worth staying with for the rest of my life. I said to myself, ‘Why not? I’ll study medicine and practise in this big city. I will not renounce my religion, but I will give up the monastic life. My country far away has nothing to entice me to go back. Octavia will be my home and the refuge of my soul. Why not? I have never seen a more beautiful woman, nor one gentler or kinder. Even as a pagan, is she not purer in heart than most of the Christian women I have known? I mean, those I have seen from afar. But who can be sure she won’t betray me one day as my mother betrayed my father? If I were to anger her one day for some reason, she could turn against me as women always turn against their husbands, for women are fickle by nature.’
Tenderly, as she lay in my arms, I asked her if she would keep on loving me whatever happened. Her answer still rings inside me and echoes in my heart. ‘Whatever happens, my love. I’ll spend my whole life at your side, looking after you, my one hope. I waited for you long and dreamed about you often, and I’ll never find anyone better than you.’
‘Then let the Lord’s will be done,’ I said.
‘My love, don’t speak that way like the Christian people. I hate them.’
‘Why, Octavia?’
‘Because they are like locusts. They eat everything that is ripe in the city, and make life gloomy and cruel.’
She was about to expound at length with disparaging remarks about those of our religion, so I changed the subject by asking her about this Savante of the Ages whom the crier was talking about in the main street.
She sat up straight and her face shone again. ‘He means Hypatia, the daughter of the scholar Theon, the Pythagorean professor,’ she said. ‘She’s a famous woman, beautiful and intelligent, and she visits us here with the friends of the Sicilian master at those soirées which go on for hours. She always calls me “my dear sister Octavia”.’
‘In what fields does she give the lectures the crier is inviting people to?’ I asked.
‘In mathematics and philos
ophy, but not in medicine. Don’t imagine that I will let you get close to her, or else you might fall in love with her and abandon me – although she is much older than you,’ she said.
‘Don’t joke, because I really do want to find out more about her.’
That day she told me much about Hypatia, the woman known as the Savante of the Ages. She spoke about her with pleasure in the telling and in a way that stimulated my interest in seeing her. Octavia said Hypatia taught at the theatre in the city centre. Her father Theon used to teach in the great temple, the Serapeion, which once stood proudly in the Egyptian quarter in the south of the city. But the Christians destroyed it and brought it down on the heads of those inside in the days of Theophilus. She meant the bishop. When I asked her what days Hypatia taught on, she looked at me from the corner of her eye, with an oblique look that mingled jealousy and a desire to pick a quarrel, and she did not answer. When I insisted, she said Hypatia lectured on Sundays because it was quiet in the mornings when the Christians went to the Church of the Wheat Seed to hear the sermon of their current leader, who had succeeded his uncle Theophilus at the head of that church which had turned the world dark! I was startled at what she said and her outspokenness frightened me.
‘Do you mean Bishop Cyril?’ I asked.
‘May the gods bring his dark days to a hasty end,’ she said. ‘He has made the city as gloomy as a ruin since the time he took charge. But you’re strange! You know Cyril but you don’t know Hypatia.’
‘Octavia, I don’t know anything here. Before I saw you, all I’d seen of your city was the stretch I walked from the Moon Gate to the beach where I almost drowned in front of your eyes.’
I will never forget her sudden happiness, as she shouted in glee, ‘True, my love, my heart, true. Now I’m happy and certain that the god sent you to me, truly and honestly.’
‘Now we’re back to superstitions.’
Azazeel Page 10